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Søren Kierkegaard Quotes

Søren Kierkegaard
  • Mini Bio
  • Name: Søren Aabye Kierkegaard
  • Born: 5th May 1813, Copenhagen, Denmark, Denmark-Norway
  • Died: 11th November 1855, Copenhagen, Denmark
  • Resting place: Assistens Cemetery, Copenhagen, Denmark
  • Alma Mater: University of Copenhagen
  • Occupation: Philosopher and Theologian
  • Region: Western philosophy
  • School: Existentialism and Continental philosophy
  • Main interests: Aesthetics, Epistemology, Ethics and Metaphysics
  • Notable Notions: Absurdism, Authenticity, Existential philosophy, Infinite qualitative distinction, Knight of faith and Leap of faith
  • Notable works: On the Concept of Irony (1841), Fear and Trembling (1843), The Concept of Anxiety (1844), Stages on Life’s Way (1845), The Sickness unto Death (1849) and The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air (1849)
  • Influenced by: Augustine of Hippo, Bernard of Clairvaux, Bonaventure, Christian Wolff, Diogenes the Cynic, Franz von Baader, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Immanuel Kant, Johann Georg Hamann, Johan Ludvig Heiberg, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Martin Luther, Plato, Regine Schlegel, René Descartes, Socrates, von Schelling, William Shakespeare and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
  • Inspired: Albert Camus, Cornel Ronald West, Emmanuel Levinas, Helmut Niebuhr, Henri de Lubac, Henrik Johan Ibsen, Jacques Ellul, Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre, Karl Barth, Lev Shestov, Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein, Martin Buber, Martin Heidegger, Paul Sartre, Roger Vernon Scruton, Rollo Reece May, Sigmund Freud, Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Kaufmann
  • Nickname: Fork and Father of Existentialism

"The truth is always in the minority & the minority is always stronger than the majority, because as a rule the minority is made up of those who actually have an opinion, the strength of the majority is illusory, formed of that crowd which has no opinion"

Søren Kierkegaard

"I stick my finger in existence - it smells of nothing. Where am I? Who am I? How came I here? What is this thing called the world? What does this world mean? Who is it that has lured me into the world? Why was I not consulted?"

Søren Kierkegaard

"When the ambitious man whose slogan is Either Caesar or nothing does not get to be Caesar, he despairs over it … precisely because he did not get to be Caesar, he cannot bear to be himself"

Søren Kierkegaard

"One must first learn to know himself before knowing anything else. Not until a man has inwardly understood himself and then sees the course he is to take does his life gain peace and meaning"

Søren Kierkegaard

"It occurs to me that artists go forward by going backward, something which I have nothing against intrinsically when it is a reproduced retreat - as is the case with the better artists"

Søren Kierkegaard

"With regard to the essential truth, a direct relation between spirit and spirit is unthinkable. If such a relation is assumed, it actually means that the party has ceased to be spirit"

Søren Kierkegaard

"A man's personality is matured only when he appropriates the truth, whether it is spoken by Balaam's ass or a sniggering wag or an apostle or an angel"

Søren Kierkegaard

"It is quite true what philosophy says, that life must be understood backward. But then one forgets the other principle, that it must be lived forward"

Søren Kierkegaard

"Worldly worry always seeks to lead a human being into the small-minded unrest of comparisons, away from the lofty calmness of simple thoughts"

Søren Kierkegaard

"I stand like a solitary spruce, egoistically unfettered and pointing upwards, throwing no shadow, and no stock-dove builds its nest in my branches"

Søren Kierkegaard

"A son is a mirror in which the father sees himself reflected, and the father is a mirror in which the son sees himself as he will be in the future"

Søren Kierkegaard

"When in the dark night of suffering sagacity cannot see a handbreadth ahead of it, then faith can see God, since faith sees best in the dark"

Søren Kierkegaard

"The trend today is in the direction of mathematical equality, so that in all classes about so and so many uniformly make one individual"

Søren Kierkegaard

"What I really need is to get clear about what I must do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge must precede every act"

Søren Kierkegaard

"Each generation has its own task and need not trouble itself unduly by being everything to previous and succeeding generations"

Søren Kierkegaard

"I say of my sorrow what the Englishman says of his home: my sorrow is my castle. Many consider sorrow one of life’s comforts"

Søren Kierkegaard

"The truth is a trap: you can not get it without it getting you; you cannot get the truth by capturing it, only by its capturing you"

Søren Kierkegaard

"If people have forgotten what it means to exist religiously, they have probably also forgotten what it means to exist humanly"

Søren Kierkegaard

"If the genius is an artist, then he accomplishes his work as art, but neither he nor his work of art has a telos outside him"

Søren Kierkegaard

"It belongs to the imperfection of everything human that man can only attain his desire by passing through its opposite"

Søren Kierkegaard

"To stand on one leg and prove God's existence is a very different thing from going on one's knees and thanking him"

Søren Kierkegaard

"Death cannot explain itself. The earnestness consists precisely in this, that the observer must explain it to himself"

Søren Kierkegaard

"The crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die"

Søren Kierkegaard

"It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand"

Søren Kierkegaard

"Deep within every human being there still lives the anxiety over the possibility of being alone in the world"

Søren Kierkegaard

"Freedom's possibility is not the ability to choose the good or the evil. The possibility is to be able"

Søren Kierkegaard

"The best proof adduced of the wretchedness of life is that derived from contemplating its glory"

Søren Kierkegaard

"People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought, which they avoid"

Søren Kierkegaard

"Life has become a bitter drink to me, and yet it must be taken in drops, counted one by one"

Søren Kierkegaard

"People in our time, because of so much knowledge, have forgotten what it means to exist"

Søren Kierkegaard

"One does not slip into being human, or gain knowledge of what it is to be human so easily"

Søren Kierkegaard

"Doubt is conquered by faith, just as it is faith which has brought doubt into the world"

Søren Kierkegaard

"Freedom succumbs to dizziness. Further than this, psychology cannot and will not go"

Søren Kierkegaard

"He made my childhood an unparalleled torture, and yet was the most loving father"

Søren Kierkegaard

"Does a Human Being Have the Right to Let Himself Be Put to Death for the Truth?"

Søren Kierkegaard

"Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it"

Søren Kierkegaard

"The more one suffers, the more, I believe, has one a sense for the comic"

Søren Kierkegaard

"What a priceless invention statistics are, what a glorious fruit of culture"

Søren Kierkegaard

"The tyrant dies and his rule is over; the martyr dies and his rule begins"

Søren Kierkegaard

"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards"

Søren Kierkegaard

"With humour there is also the joy that has triumphed over the world"

Søren Kierkegaard

"The world and Christianity have completely opposite conceptions"

Søren Kierkegaard

"Comparison is the most dangerous acquaintance love can make"

Søren Kierkegaard

"The present age is essentially a sensible age, devoid of passion"

Søren Kierkegaard

"Happiness is the greatest hiding place for despair"

Søren Kierkegaard

"With the one face I laugh, with the other I weep"

Søren Kierkegaard

"Every flower in my heart becomes an ice fern"

Søren Kierkegaard

"Irony is a qualification of subjectivity"

Søren Kierkegaard
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Soren Kierkegaard's Legacy

Renowned today as the father of existentialist thought, Kierkegaard was a philosopher of irony who squeezed himself into a vast number of pseudonyms in order to view the world from another man's shoes. His pseudonyms eased the passage to create different forms of expression from the view point he was considering.

His 360 degree study of philosophical thinking shone a light across the spectrum of his mind that explored angst, fear, joy and suffering. All his neural pathways seemed to lead to faith. He concluded that reason alone would never provide all the answers, but, by exhausting rationality the only rational thing to do would be to take a leap into faith.

Not just a philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard was a poet and a theologian all rolled into an intensity of thought that drove the question how to be a good human being and live a truthful life.

His written output was voluminous with more than fifty titles pondering a rich tapestry of complex philosophical notions that touched the thinking minds of subsequent generations.

Quotes About Søren Kierkegaard

The philosopher Karl Jaspers pondered his place in the historical hierarchy of philosophy: "I approach the presentation of Kierkegaard with some trepidation. Next to Nietzsche, or rather, prior to Nietzsche, I consider him to be the most important thinker of our post-Kantian age"

A scholar, Paul Holmer, shared this interesting perspective: "Kierkegaard's constant and lifelong wish, to which his entire literature gives expression, was to create a new and rich subjectivity in himself and his readers"

The American philosopher Jerry Fodor summed him up thus: "A master and way out of the league that the rest of us play in"

The writer Adam Phillips shared this view: "Kierkegaard’s life and writing are a testament to the cruelty, the generosity and the inventiveness of those who believe in the Real Thing, the prophets of authenticity"

A theologian, Rabbi Milton Steinberg, left this cryptic advice: "Søren Kierkegaard addressed himself neither to Jews nor to Judaism. But they have overheard him. In part because they could not help it... Jews are well advised to be on the alert for what they can learn not only about him but about themselves also"

An American philosopher, Mortimer J. Adler, opined this opinion in 1962: "For Kierkegaard, man is essentially an individual, not a member of a species or race; and ethical and religious truth is known through individual existence and decision-through subjectivity, not objectivity"

The writer Gordon Marino shared this rueful observation: "In an age when all psychic life is being understood in terms of neurotransmitters, the art of introspection has become passé. Galileos of the inner world, such as Soren Kierkegaard, have been packed off to the museum of antiquated ideas"

Marino then mused on what the Danish philosopher would make of today's world: "If Kierkegaard were on Facebook or could post a You Tube video, he would certainly complain that we, who have listened to Prozac, have become deaf to the ancient distinction between psychological and spiritual disorders, between depression and despair"

The scholar Clare Carlisle spoke of his industrious nature: "He was extraordinarily prolific, producing on average a couple of books each year during the 1840s. Some of these are provocative, genre-defying works on philosophical and religious themes"

The German theologian Otto Pfleiderer aired this view in 1887: "Kierkegaard can only find true Christianity in entire renunciation of the world, in the following of Christ in lowliness and suffering especially when met by hatred and persecution on the part of the world"

The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was impressed to say: "Kierkegaard was by far the most profound thinker of the last century. Kierkegaard was a saint"

Wittgenstein then dug deeper: "Kierkegaard is far too deep for me, anyhow. He bewilders me without working the good effects which he would in deeper souls"

The Danish scholar Georg Brandes pondered this comparable question that highlighted the visionary mind of Kierkegaard: "There are two types of the artistic soul. There is the one which needs many varying experiences and constantly changing models, and which instantly gives a poetic form to every fresh incident. There is the other which requires amazingly few outside elements to fertilise it, and for which a single life circumstance, inscribed with sufficient force, can furnish a whole wealth of ever-changing thought and modes of expression. Soren Kierkegaard among writers, and Max Klinger among painters, are both great examples of the latter type. To which did Shakespeare belong?"

The scholar Maurice S Friedman noted the influence of the Danish philosopher: "Probably the strongest influence on Buber's concept of realization, however, was the existentialist philosophy of Soren Kierkegaard"

The philosopher Christopher Sverre Norborg described him thus: "Kierkegaard does not deny the fruitfulness or validity of abstract thinking (science, logic, and so on), but he does deny any superstition which pretends that abstract theorizing is a sufficient concluding argument for human existence"

The Austrian writer Friedrich von Hügel shared this description: "Kierkegaard, the deep, melancholy, strenuous, utterly uncompromising Danish religionist, is a spiritual brother of the great Frenchman, Blaise Pascal, and of the striking English Tractarian, Hurrell Froude, who died young and still full of crudity, yet left an abiding mark upon all who knew him well"

Perhaps Carl Jung should have looked more closely at the political arena where they are bountiful: "For all its critical analysis philosophy has not yet managed to root out its psychopaths. What do we have psychiatric diagnosis for? That grizzler Kierkegaard also belongs in this galere"

The scholar John George Robertson spoke of a void in the view of the English-speaking world: "The Norwegians, Ibsen and Bjørnson, have exerted a very real power on our intellectual life, and for Bjørnson we have cherished even a kind of affection. But Kierkegaard, the writer who holds the indispensable key to the intellectual life of Scandinavia, to whom Denmark in particular looks up as her most original man of genius in the nineteenth century, we have wholly overlooked"

The author Colin Wilson contemplated his intense stance: "If we think of Kierkegaard, of Nietzsche, of Hölderlin, we see them standing alone, outside of history. They are spotlighted by their intensity, and the background is all darkness. They intersect history, but are not a part of it. There is something anti-history about such men; they are not subject to time, accident and death, but their intensity is a protest against it"

The Austrian psychologist Wilhelm Stekel labelled him as: "the philosopher of Don Juanism"

The German philosopher Walter Kaufmann was impressed to say: "I know of no other great writer in the whole nineteenth century, perhaps even in the whole of world literature, to whom I respond with less happiness and with a more profound sense that I am on trial and found wanting, unless it were Søren Kierkegaard"

The theologian Karl Barth drew inspiration from his work: "If I have a system it is limited to a recognition of what Kierkegaard called the 'infinite qualitative distinction' and to my regarding this as possessing negative as well as positive significance"

The author William Hubben made this interesting comparison: "Logic and human reasoning are inadequate to comprehend truth, and in this emphasis Dostoevsky speaks entirely the language of Kierkegaard, of whom he had never heard"


Søren Kierkegaard quote

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